McParlan, the great villain of the piece from my point of view, was also a great hero to many. There was quite a bit of pulp fiction about him. The reputation of Pinkerton's as THE private detective agency (especially if you require goons and ginks and company finks in connection with a labor dispute) is largely owing to his pernicious work. McParlan was not only a major figure in the eventual hanging of the Molly Maguires in Pa., he was also the principal "framer" of the trumped-up case against Big Bill Haywood and others in Couerdelaine (sp?), Idaho, when a terrorist bomb blew up the governor. McParlan was one busy fellow.

I am pretty sure that McParlan's work inspired a series of pulp detective novels in which he was the star. He was certainly a great hero to the capitalist class who seem to have done their best to propagandize his virtues.

I expect there is a great deal of folk-loric type material about him, other than the negative references that appear in a couple of the songs set forth above. In the Sean Connery movie (which was pretty damned good, considering), he was ambiguously (perhaps realistically) portrayed as something other than villain but somehow less than a hero.

Does anyone have some interesting songs and stories about McParlan, rather than than about his victims? I would be interested in the positive ones as well as the negative ones (in the interest of impartial science).